Playing in Lima

We have had a great first day here in Lima.  Well, it started off with Moyra receiving an email letting her know that one of her flights later this week had been cancelled.  I was scheduled on the same flight but received no email. The flight was rescheduled for the next day which meant we also had two hostal reservations to change. Moyra emailed the airlines to confirm her new flight and asked about my reservation.  They responded later with "oh sorry, yes her too."  All we could do was laugh.
We had wonderful hot showers, got dressed and went out to explore.  The first thing we found was a candy store which of course had samples....yum, we tried some plum, chocolate candy...really good.  We walked around for a bit and stumbled upon a vegetarian cafe.  We went in to explore the menu.  The man working there said they were running out of food.  Well, we figured that if the food was almost gone it must be good so we sat down.  We had three courses, drinks, and bread for $2.90.  It was so good.  One dish was this amazing quinoa salad that hopefully we can recreate when we get home. We also had a great soup, some type of bean stew with brown rice, linguini with some type of nut sauce.  We have no idea what the drink was.  We guessed maybe apple juice and green tea mixed.  We asked the man if we could pay in dollars.  Most places accept dollars or soles.  He took our dollars then left to go get change somewhere.  When he came back I asked about identifying counterfeit money which is a big problem here in Peru. He was so nice and gave us a lesson and took money out of the till to show us different bills.  We left the restaurant and walked around finally ending up in a large grocery store.  I love looking at food in different countries.  This store was beautiful.  There were so many types of produce that I had never seen before.  Looking at all the tags was a great way to build vocabulary.  We ended up buying plantain chips, Inka corn (corn nuts), chocolate, and bottled water.  While walking around we found a bubble tea place.  You HAVE to try bubble tea wherever you find it.  We asked the people working what flavors we should try, again they were so nice.  We ended up with two flavors of fruits from Peru and I have no idea what they were but it was really good.  It did not appear that they had jellies so we both had bobas.  Finally, we ended up at a souvenir place close to the hostal.  Of course I wanted to buy all of the softie alpaca sweaters, hats, and mittens but I don't want to carry stuff yet so sadly it all stayed in the store.  We have made friends with Eduardo one of the taxi drivers for the hostal.  He will be picking us up at 5:50 in the morning as we catch a flight to Cusco.  We are leaving two of our bags here so we can travel lighter for the next week.  Ok that's it, time for bed.  We are also noticing that the news here is much more graphic.  The TV really cleans things up for us at home.  Buenas Noches!